Hello from the Pope, in praise of holiness

The story — which has no Bay Area connection — was passed along by a friend (Bruce Gerstman) of its teller, through a layer of Facebook, finally through Carol Pogash of Berkeley, who called it to The Chronicle’s attention. Finally, I talked about it firsthand with Matias Verna, a psychiatrist who works in Manhattan. His father, breast cancer surgeon/specialist Mario Verna, had died on Dec. 3.

Mario Verna was born in Buenos Aires in 1937, and he immigrated to the United States once as a young man, and then in 1976 when a military dictatorship was running Argentina. “As a kid, he was in a Catholic Action youth group,” said Matias Verna. “We used to hear a lot about this group growing up because a lot of his friends were from this group. Then when Francis became pope in 2013, my dad started telling us that he was one of the kids in that group. It seemed believable, but at the same time my dad has always been known for regaling people with his stories … and he was already starting to struggle with dementia. ...

“At one pont he mentioned that he would drink maté with Jorge (Bergoglio).” In the last few years, “my dad became increasingly impaired with his dementia,” said Matias, “and in the past few months, it really deteriorated rapidly. When he died” — on Monday, Dec. 3 — “my brother and I were starting to make phone calls.” They split up the list of people who needed to be called, and then “He said, kind of chuckling, ‘we have to call the pope.’ ... I just instinctively responded, ‘Yeah, I’ll take care of that … seriously, I will take care of that.’”

At home later that day, “I composed a one-page fax message. because I had learned, just looking it up online, that that’s the way to get in touch with the pope, by fax. Email is no good and he doesn’t respond to direct messages on Twitter.”

Matias researched fax numbers and called some of them “to see which calls reached a fax machine.” When he found one he thought would work, he sent the pope a short letter to say his father had died, that he thought they’d been schoolmates. When he sent his brothers copies of the fax, one of them berated him. “You wrote ‘Dear Pope,’ what is the matter with you? You’re supposed to write Supreme Pontiff or …

“I said I understood that this guy is kind of a guy’s guy, and I just wanted to make it personal. Later on I told my wife, ‘Oh, I faxed the pope by the way.’ She glanced up from her laptop and nodded.”

He turned up the ringer on his phone, and left it on all night, “just in case. The next morning I am driving to the nursing home, to where my father had been, to clean up the room.”

The phone rang, the caller identified as “unknown.” With the fax, “on my mind, I said, ‘Hello,’ and I heard his voice and recognized it immediately.” The conversation was in Spanish, which was Matias’ first language.

“‘Are you from the Verna family?’ the Pope asked. ‘I received your message. Of course I remember El Flaco (the skinny guy) well.’ And then he paused and said, ‘We are at that age when we’re starting to get called back.’

“So I did my best to reconstruct the conversation in my head, and I wrote it down immediately. The conversation consisted of me profusely thanking him, and the rest of the conversation on his part was ‘I will pray for your father at tomorrow’s Mass.’ ... I remember thanking him. And I remembered that Paul had said I was supposed to call him Holiest Father. So I said, ‘Holiest Father. I don’t know how to thank you for this.’ Then we said our good-byes and I sat in my car crying and shaking.”

Had Matias Vernas been a religious man? No, not really, he said. His father had been religious in his youth, but “that was about it.” He sent along his account of the conversation with Pope Francis, as remembered right afterward.

My favorite part was the greeting: Is this the Verna family? asked the caller from Rome. “Soy el Papa Francisco.”

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING

“I love my new condo! It’s in a great neighborhood and five minutes away from my grandkids — only thing wrong is it’s older and in need of some rehab.”

“Aren’t we all, dear?”

Two women at Temescal Farmers Market in Oakland

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PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING

“I love my new condo! It’s in a great neighborhood and five minutes away from my grandkids — only thing wrong is it’s older and in need of some rehab.”

Leah Garchik washed up on the shores of Fifth and Mission in 1972, began her duties as a part-time temporary steno clerk, and ascended the journalistic ladder. Over the years, she has served as writer, reviewer, editor and columnist. She is the author of two books, “San Francisco: Its Sights and Secrets” and “Real Life Romance."

She is an avid knitter, a terrible accordion player, a sporadic tweeter and a pretty good speller.